In a story that encapsulates all of the difficult issues involved in the global shift toward sustainability, the last remaining General Electric plant in the US that produces incandescent lights will be closed this month. A 2007 law essentially outlawed the old-fashioned bulbs that were made ubiquitous by Thomas Edison. In a perfect world, the 200 jobs lost at the Virginia factory would be......read more

General Electric has announced plans to build the largest solar panel manufacturing plant in the United States. The project is estimated to cost around $600 million, and will deliver about 400 megawatts of production of thin-film solar.The company hopes that by going bigger on the production side they can deliver economies of scale and make solar panels more affordable for the masses.......read more

On Friday, General Electric announced plans to build a $300 million solar panel plant in Colorado. The factory, near Denver, will be the largest in the U.S. The announcement is a strong show of confidence for the solar industry, which has been rocked by a string of bankruptcies and falling prices.
GE, a global leader in wind turbine manufacturing, is entering the solar panel business at a......read more

If all goes according to General Electric's plans, the next generation of wind turbine blades will be wrapped in fabric. With a $5.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) program, GE is developing a new fabric-covered wind turbine blade that the company says will perform just as well as conventional fiberglass blades,......read more

After doing their job absorbing leaked oil, dirty oil booms typically go to the their graves in the landfill, where they languish for eternity. But, as GreenTech Media reports, that doesn't have to be the case. In a triumphant PR move, General Motors has found a way to intervene in the cycle, by making use of oil booms from the Gulf for passive car parts like air dams and water deflectors.......read more

Urban gardening used to seem subversive. People planted tomatoes in public parks, strung their hops to rooftops to make homebrew and reclaimed empty lots as community farms, never mind the property owner. Yet here in one of the more thoroughly tilled cities in America, subversive has come full circle: the federal government plans to plant its own bold garden directly above a downtown plaza. As......read more

Located in the Outer Sunset district of San Francisco, General Store offers up a tasteful selection of daily goods, including these rough-hewn wood boxes, which are handmade from a variety of tree species. Dubbed "Woods From the Forrest" (their spelling, not ours), the boxes are shaped from chunks of wood pulled straight from the forest floor. That gives them a raw, natural feel that......read more

Coming from the same folks who brought you the Original Tree Swing, this classic sling shot is handcrafted from branches of the Buckthorn bush. The Buckthorn is a common European hedge plant found across the northern US, and is now considered an invasive species. The hardwood "Y" branches are ideal for sling shots, and harvesting Buckthorn wood has the added benefit of helping control the......read more

Portland General Store's Whiskey Aftershave is infused with a light whiskey scent, "reminiscent of an ol' yachtsman relaxing below deck at the end of a long day on the wild ocean, a favorite Scotch in hand." Right, okay. Actually the scent is really good, and although it's definitively masculine the list of ingredients is decidedly not -- sea kelp extract, blue-green algae, organic aloe......read more